Conversations in Craft and Content: Kali Fajardo-Anstine

Arizona State University presents Conversations in Craft and Content, a creative writing lecture series hosted and moderated by Mitchell Jackson, Guggenheim fellow, Pulitzer winner, and the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor of English at ASU.

The series brings lauded writers to ASU for lectures on the ideas in their work, as well as their writing and revision process and the philosophies that guide them. It welcomes National Book Award-finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine as the fall guest in a virtual event on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2022 at 6 p.m. AZ/MST (5 p.m. PST / 7 p.m. CST / 8 p.m. EST).

About the guest
Kali Fajardo-Anstine is the nationally bestselling author of the novel "Woman of Light" and the story collection "Sabrina & Corina," a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, The Clark Prize, The Story Prize, the Saroyan International Prize, and winner of an American Book Award, she is the 2021 recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been honored with the Denver Mayor’s Award for Global Impact in the Arts and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Award. She has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, O: the Oprah Magazine, The American Scholar, Boston Review, and elsewhere, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Tin House.

Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida. She is the 2022 - 2024 Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

About the moderator
Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel "The Residue Years" received wide critical praise and won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the Lannan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, PEN America, TED, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Marie Claire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere.

Jackson’s nonfiction book "Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family" was published in 2019 and named a best book of the year by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed. His next novel "John of Watts" will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and covers race and culture as the first Black columnist in the history of Esquire. He is the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at ASU.

About the series
The Conversations in Craft and Content series is organized and supported by the creative writing program in the Department of English at ASU.